Wednesday, October 3, 2012

So I have a painting hanging in the Gutman Library, in Harvard Square.
It's part of a small faculty exhibition from MassArt, and it will be up for a few weeks.

The Gutman Library is on Brattle Street, on your way out of the Square.
It's about a block further past the Brattle Theatre, on the right.
Location on a map.

The image is a portrait of my friend James.
I hung the piece before I had a chance to document it with a good photo/scan.
So, I'll have to do that later when the show comes down, and I can upload the image properly.

Meanwhile, I took some photos with my camera.

Here's the painting. It's 16"x20", and made with open acrylics and gouache:

Here's a view of the show, and where it's hanging. You can also see some of the other faculty work, they are all so good!:

Plus, the view from outside:

From the sidewalk on Brattle Street, you can see the pieces through the window at night.

If you find yourself in Harvard Square, walk by and take a look :)
Or just, y'know, go inside the building and see the stuff up close.

Made for my friend T', who is a local boy far away from home. These may get a little fanciful, but they are more Wish-You-Were-Here postcards than literal documentary.

The Prudential Building is one of the primary landmarks of Boston. You can see it from miles away, like Mt. Fuji, or the Eiffel Tower - even as far as Waltham, (if above the trees, say, in the Viking Tower), and further if the day is clear.

As long as you can see it, you can't get lost in the Boston Metro area; aim for it and you'll eventually find the center of the city.

It's fundamentally a solid slab of brute Modernist construction from the mid-60's. I'm told it's an eyesore - or anonymous architecture, at best. Though I personally feel that the design is redeemed by the top observatory floors and the organic mass of antennas that have sprung up over the years on the roof.

Because it is so tall, the evocative radio towers on top are never actually all that distinct - they could imaginatively be anything really. An omnipresent, but inaccessible fantasyland of spidery spires like the Watts Towers. A distant magical forest. A micro-sized futuristic Buck Rogers metropolis, like Emerald City at night, or the City In A Bottle from 1001 Arabian Nights, or simply the Pru having a bad hair day. The rest of the building feels like a pedestal for this stuff and the top few floors. The whole thing could be a spaceship on a custom-built landing pad.

The top design justifies the plainness of rest of the building and gives it character.

The view from the observation floor is amazing, and all the more so during the various hazy states of moody New England weather.